Since the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is supporting IPCC and Pachauri, it may seem motivated to let also the Academy face an independent inquiry.

Why bother about a statement of the Academy in support of IPCC? Because Swedish climate policy is based on this statement as a statement of the highest scientific authority: If the Academy would change position and withdraw its unconditional support of IPCC, then Swedish climate politics would have to change.

But the Academy has not modified its statement/support of IPCC after the scandals hitting IPCC since Climategate in November 2009. Nor has Swedish climate politics changed after

Copenhagen. But this is unreasonable, and in science unreason does not last...

The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

A new generation of sophisticated Earth models is gearing up for its first major test.

But added complexity may lead to greater uncertainty about the future climate.

Is it true that added complexity = better spacial and temporal resolution, increases the uncertainty of a flow simulation like a climate simulation? Can better resolution give worse results?

No, in general you would expect that better resolution gives better accuracy. However, in flow simulation it is possible that you can fool yourself into believing the opposite, because of the presence of turbulence, as explained in The Secret of Turbulence with the following essential feature:

In a simulation on coarse mesh the flow may come out as laminar, because a coarse mesh introduces substantial artificial numerical viscosity preventing transition to turbulence, while

can upon mesh refinement turn into a very different turbulent solution.

Now, a laminar solution may look nicely ordered and stable, while a turbulent solution

may seem messy unordered and unstable, and if you are naive you could draw the conclusion that mesh refinement gives a worse result.

But this is not so: The nice-looking laminar solution carries no information of value, while

the ugly-looking turbulent solution carries valuable information. This is shown in the book Computational Turbulent Incompressible Flow to depend on cancellation effects in turbulent flow, with the main message that computational simulation is possible without resolving the flow to its physical scale, only so that turbulence develops.

The conclusion concerning climate simulation is that the mesh has to be sufficiently fine for turbulence to develop, which requires a mesh of about 100 x 100 x 100 = 1 million mesh points,

(on a cubical domain), which is no problem on a supercomputer. For the Globe, 100 million mesh points could suffice and be possible.

We know that a large part of the temperature increase during the latter half of the 20th century is very likely due to an increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by human activity.

In addition, projections of possible future climate change can be made.

In the light of Climategate these key statements now seem to lack scientific support.

The need of a new hearing (by the Commission on Sustainable Development or better a new Commission) is obvious and urgent.

1. The authors show no understanding of fluid mechanics, of how small viscosity leads to experimentally verified thin boundary layers, and of how experimentally verified these boundary layers detach when the external flow decelerates.

2. The authors show no understanding of mathematics, of how in the Euler equations streamlines leaving a surface will be vortex sheets which divide the domain into regions in which there is separately potential flow.

3. The authors show no understanding of numerics, of how finite element methods introduce an artificial viscosity (or hyper-viscosity in high-order methods) through the truncation error, and so their solutions are not solutions of the Euler equation but solutions of a Navier-Stokes equation.

I am alarmed that these authors have another paper accepted by JFM: I recommend that someone checks it for logic.

Referee 2:

THE AUTHORS PROPOSE RESOLVE D'ALEMBERT'S PARADOX BY SHOWING THAT THE ZERO DRAG POTENTIAL SOLUTION OF EULER'S EQUATIONS IS UNSTABLE AND INSTEAD A TURBULENT (APPROXIMATE) SOLUTION DEVELOPS WITH A NON ZERO DRAG, EVEN WITHOUT BOUNDARY LAYER EFFECTS.

THEY BASE THEIR RESULT ON NUMERICAL CALCULATION MOSTLY DONE IN 2006 WITH THEIR OWN NUMERICAL PACKAGE.

THE EQUATIONS THEY STUDY (2.1) HAVE NO PARAMETERS OTHER THAN THE VELOCITY SO THAT THEIR CONCLUSIONS MUST APPLY TO ALL REYNOLDS NUMBERS.

SINCE TURBULENCE DOES NOT DEVELOP AT LOW RE THEIR RESULT GOES TOO FAR. I DO NOT KNOW HOW THEY GET VORTICITY WHEN THE INTIAL FLOW IS IRROTATIONAL, BAROTROPIC AND WITHOUT SHEAR LAYERS.

I DO NOT NOT UNDERSTAND THEIR USE OF SEPARATION WHEN THERE ARE NO BOUNDARY LAYERS TO SEPARATE. I HAVE ATTACHED A CITATION FROM LIGHTHILL IN WHICH HE ADVOCATES REPLACING d'ALEMBERTS PARADOX WITH d'ALEMBERTS THEOREM.

THIS PAPER SHOULD BE REJECTED.

I DID NOT READ THEIR NUMERICAL PAPERS WHICH ARE VERY NEW AND APPARENTLY NOT VALIDATED AGAINST EXACT SOLUTIONS AND OTHER TURBULENT CODES.

It is clear that these referee's are out kill, and they do it! The paper was then submitted to Journal of Mathematical Fluid Mechanics and was accepted and published in Dec 2008.

Climategate has shown that some of climate science has been a dirty business, and I have experienced similar practice in fluid mechanics. The Climategate drama is now unfolding and its consequences must be far-reaching...carbon trading is losing momentum...Maybe the emails behind dAlembertgate will also be made public...maybe according to FOI...

If you look into the details of dAlembertgate you will discover that the new resolution of d'Alembert's paradox fundamentally changes the mathematical basis of fluid dynamics and that the attitude of JFM is untenable...

Question A - Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

Phil Jones: An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I've assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly

different from each other.

Question D - Do you agree that natural influences could have contributed significantly to the global warming observed from 1975-1998, and, if so, please could you specify each natural influence and express its radiative forcing over the period in Watts per square metre.

Phil Jones: This area is slightly outside my area of expertise. When considering changes over this period we need to consider all possible factors (so human and natural influences as well as natural internal variability of the climate system). Natural influences (from volcanoes and the Sun) over this period could have contributed to the change over this period. Volcanic influences from the two large eruptions (El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991) would exert a negative influence. Solar influence was about flat over this period. Combining only these two natural influences, therefore, we might have expected some cooling over this period.

Question E - How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?

Phil Jones: I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.

Question V - If you have confidence in your science why didn't you come out fighting like the UK government's drugs adviser David Nutt when he was criticised?

Phil Jones: I don't feel this question merits an answer.

Both question (i) and (ii) are scientific questions which can be answered today, or not. It is up to the scientific community including the Royal Society and Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to present answers or if this is not yet possible, to make this clear.

It is time for Phil Jones and the Royals to come out in the open and fight. This is how science is performed, unlike business and politics taking place in closed boards behind closed doors, and how merits in science are gained.

Or rather, this is how science is supposed to work, but the practice is different, as now being

So what reception do they get? Instead of embracing this diversity of knowledge— thanking them for their experience (no one knows everything about everything) and using that knowledge to improve their own calculations—these power-brokers of climate science instead ignore, fob off, ridicule, threaten, and ultimately black- ball those who dare to question the methods that they—the power-brokers, the leaders—have used.

And do not be confused: I am here talking about those scientists within their own camps, not the “skeptics” which they dismiss out of hand.

This is not “climate science”, it is climate ideology; it is the Church of Climatology. It is this betrayal of the principles of science—in what is arguably the most important public application of science in our lifetime—that most distresses scientists.

A parallel story, on a much smaller scale but with the same ingredients, is my own experience with my resolution together with Johan Hoffman of the 250 year old d'Alembert's paradox as a central problem of fluid mechanics.

tisdag 9 februari 2010

The IPCC panel should arguably be replaced by a body controlled by national scientific academies rather than governments.

This is because IPCC has lost all scientific credibility. Fine, IPCC should be dismantled. But is it such a good idea to hand over to the Royal Society of London and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences?

Probably not, because the Royals have been very loyal supporters of IPCC all along and have been keen to express official endorsements of IPCC, which have not been revised because of Climategate and all the other scandals connected to IPCC and its chairman Pachauri.

Not yet at least, but the time to leave the sinking ship is near, right?

onsdag 3 februari 2010

The embattled chief Dr Rajendra Pachauri of the UN's climate change body IPCC has hit out at his critics and refused to resign or apologise for a damaging mistake in a landmark 2007 report on global warming.

Pachauri said it would be hypocritical to apologise for the false claim that Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035, because he was not personally responsible for that part of the report. "You can't expect me to be personally responsible for every word in a 3,000 page report," he said.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences neither apologizes for its unreserved endorsement of

the IPCC 2007 report, probably using the same argument. Of course, an Academy of Sciences cannot be responsible for whatever science it endorses, and cannot be expected to apologize for endorsing incorrect science...or maybe it can...because the pressure is building up...

Matt Ridley salutes the bloggers who changed the climate debate. While most of Fleet Street kowtowed to the green lobby, online amateurs uncovered the spin and deception that finally cracked the consensus.